Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Our reading from the Book of Wisdom today presents us with the middle of
a long rhapsody on the works of Holy Wisdom throughout the Genesis stories.
Today we hear about Wisdom at work in the lives of Jacob and then his son
Joseph. Earlier in the chapter, we hear recaps of the stories of Adam, Cain,
Noah, Abraham, and Lot, and it continues from here to tell the story of Moses.
The point is that Holy Wisdom has continued to work through human beings ever
since, including you and me, granting us the wisdom we need to be courageous in
our actions.

The psalmist speaks of the kinds of actions we need to take that might
require such courage: “Save the weak and orphan; defend the humble and needy;
rescue the weak and poor; deliver them from the power of the wicked.”
Furthermore, the psalmist expresses real urgency in God’s judgment of us when
we do not act: “How long will you judge unjustly, and show favor to the
wicked?”

In my experience, the Christian life should be an epic adventure. Yet we
live in a time and place where many of us don’t have to be adventurous if we
don’t want to be. Many of us have the option to carve out a rather easy life
for ourselves and not worry about those whose situation in life won’t allow
them this privilege. I think it’s a form of entropy—meaning to develop courage,
but never actually doing it. It takes a lot of effort to resist such entropy.

William Lloyd Garrisonimage from biography.com

Today we honor two people who definitely did not carve out an easy life
for themselves. They were heroes of the 19th-century anti-slavery
movement: a white man, William Lloyd Garrison, and a black woman, Maria
Stewart. Garrison was the founder of the anti-slavery newspaper called The
Liberator. Stewart was the first African-American woman to make public
speeches and lectures against slavery in America.

Garrison insisted that slavery should be abolished immediately, and that former
slave owners should receive absolutely no recompense for their slaves’ release.
Why should we financially compensate people, he asked, for perpetuating such deplorable
sin? The Liberator was an extremely popular paper; even the White House carried
a subscription.

One occasional contributor to The Liberator was Maria Stewart, a
free black woman who, shortly after her husband’s premature death, experienced
a religious conversion and committed herself not only to the anti-slavery
movement, but also to fighting systemic racism against free blacks in the
north. It was not enough to abolish slavery, but also to insist on the absolute
equality of all people. To relegate all free blacks to servants’ jobs was to
waste the intellectual capacities of millions of Americans. Despite her
eloquence and power, Stewart stressed that she was not well educated—that she,
too, was a victim of American racism in her lack of opportunity. She claimed
that her inspiration came not from any particular skills she had attained, but directly
from God. She herself put it this way in 1832:

Methinks there are no chains
so galling as the chains of ignorance—no fetters so binding as those that bind
the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific
knowledge. O, had I received the advantages of early education, my ideas would,
ere now, have expanded far and wide; but, alas! I possess nothing but moral
capability—no teachings but the teachings of the Holy spirit.[1]

Maria Stewart

image from zinnedproject.org

Maria Stewart was the first American woman to speak to a mixed audience of white and black men and women. She also worked for women’s rights. And during these years she occasionally penned essays for The Liberator. But after only three years of public speaking, she gave it up. One day in 1833, when speaking at Boston’s African Masonic Lodge, she opined that black men lacked “ambition and requisite courage.”[2] Her comment caused such an uproar of negativity that she decided to go back to teaching, a sad end to a very exciting ministry.

These
days, we have laws that are meant to prevent racism from oppressing people.
Those who espouse truly racist attitudes have to find more subtle ways to act on
them that don’t attract quite as much notice, while deniable, unexamined racism
is also a real issue. So I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine what it
must have been like to fight something as ubiquitous as slavery in America 200
years ago. It’s hard to imagine now that to be against slavery was once a
radical issue. And no doubt, many times, both Garrison and Stewart heard these
words: “Look, we understand your good intentions, but can’t you tone it down a
little? Can’t we take baby steps? Slavery is the economic backbone of the
south. Do you have any idea how much damage it would do to the economy to just
end it?”

To
Garrison, such economic worries mattered not a whit in the face of a situation
so obviously and deeply immoral. In the first issue of The Liberator,
Garrison made his agenda known in no uncertain terms, as follows:

I am aware that many object to
the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as
harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not
wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose
house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his
wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her
babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation
in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not
excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy
of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to
hasten the resurrection of the dead.[3]

Despite his
strong language, Garrison rejected violence as a means of freeing slaves.
Still, his critics viewed him as a dangerous inciter because he was so
unyielding.

In 1963, with the work of Garrison and Stewart still going on in new
ways, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote from a Birmingham jail: “Injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” When criticized for causing
tension, King wrote, “There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which
is necessary for growth.” And when it was suggested to King that fighting
racism was merely a matter of individual people’s choices, he wrote, “Lamentably,
it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges
voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their
unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be
more immoral than individuals.”[4]

King’s words still ring true today. When I imagine myself living 200
years ago, and I try to strike from the record all of our history since then, I
cannot help but wonder what I would think of Garrison and Stewart, even if I
found their views compelling. Would I not stand with those who were calling for
them to tone it down, to take it slowly, to be patient as God is patient? I’m
ashamed to say it, but I probably would. And when I think of Maria Stewart, who
had the courage to challenge those who were normally her most ardent
supporters, I’m reminded that prophets are not typically welcomed in their
hometown. Speaking God’s truth, especially when there are detractors on both
sides, can be very costly indeed.

How does all this sit with you today? When you hear a story of Jesus
healing a woman immediately—not next week, not in a few decades, but right
now—what does that stir in you? When you hear that the wisdom of God dwells in
you and enables you to do courageous things today—what are those courageous
things? What words of wisdom is God speaking into your heart today? And what
will you do about them? Amen.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

In our Collect today—that is, in the
prayer towards the beginning of the service that sums up our intentions for
gathering in worship on this particular occasion—we heard this: “Stir up your
power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely
hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and
deliver us.”

“We are sorely hindered by our sins.”
And so we ask for grace and mercy. This is our purpose in gathering on this,
the third Sunday in Advent, and it is a vulnerable thing to say. Saying it in communal
worship makes it easier, I suppose, but it can also distance us from the effect
of the words. Let’s not do that today. Let’s lean into the discomfort of our
sins a little. The challenge of the Christian life is not to never, ever fall
short. Rather, it is to repent and start again.

Remember record stores?

Friends, I want to tell you today
about the first time I came face to face with racism in me. Twenty years ago I
was an assistant manager at a record store in Seattle’s Southcenter Mall, and I
found myself eyeing black customers with more suspicion than white customers. We
moved the hip hop CDs near the register to keep an eye on them. Over the course
of a year, every single shoplifter we caught was black. And then it finally hit
me: Whatever other shoplifters there may have been, we didn’t catch them because
we weren’t looking for them.

Furthermore, I hadn’t even begun to ask
the question, “Why do people shoplift?” They were the bad guys, and I was
supposed to stop them. But if there's one thing Jesus has taught me, it's that the world isn’t cleanly split into good guys and bad
guys. Yes, it is wrong to shoplift. But what is the larger story, and how does
my place in the system guarantee that I do not immediately comprehend it? On
that day, I saw clearly the racism in myself.

Theologian Karl Barth once said that
he prepared his Sunday sermons by taking “the Bible in one hand and the daily
newspaper in the other.” There’s lots of discomfort to be found there. And I
could give you a laundry list of social ills, but that would be to spread the
discomfort around and thus mitigate it too soon. Instead, on this day when we
hear from John the Baptist, I want to talk very plainly about race. Because when
it comes to race in America, “we are sorely hindered by our sins.”

I am not saying that we are all a
bunch of racists. But sin is not just about actions that we choose to do. It is
also about what we don't do, and about the systems that we are a part of. When
it comes to issues of race, we Americans are still hindered by our history, by
our habits, and by what we allow to happen. From the very beginning, “all men
are created equal” meant no such thing. While we claim to value diversity, our
schools, churches, and neighborhoods are more segregated now than they were in
the 1950s. We want to see police as those who protect and serve. But in black
neighborhoods, most everybody knows someone who has been treated unjustly by
law enforcement. And today, all around our country, protesters are calling us
to repentance.

Wait. Whom are they calling to repentance?
Surely not us, right here in this room! Well, the presenting issue is police
behavior. Protesters are calling our nation’s police departments to higher
standards of accountability, and that’s a pretty clear-cut goal. But all of
this is part of a much larger conversation that has been going on for
centuries, and while I'd like to say that we cannot avoid being a part of it, that's
not actually true.

Now I know that I’m talking to a room
full of people who hate racism and want it gone. And most of us in this room
are white. Though our ancestors may have come from a variety of countries, when
I pass someone on the street who is a different color from me, that person does
not see me as a mix of German and Swiss and English; such differences are not
relevant in that moment. In America, we are seen as white. So whatever it means
to be white, whether we like it or not, we bring this quality to all our
encounters with strangers.

Chris Rock
image from goldderby.com

Biologists tell us that race is a
social construct, and that's true. But our ancestors did construct it, and so
we have to deal with the consequences. It’s only been a few decades since
Italians, Greeks, and Jews in our country were categorized as “black.” Comedian
Chris Rock recently said, “When we talk about race relations in America or
racial progress, it’s all nonsense ... White people were crazy. Now they’re not
as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they
deserve what happened to them before.”[1]
Indeed. A recent study by the FBI shows that every three or four days in the
U.S., a black man is killed by a white police officer.[2] That’s
not because every one of these individuals, criminal or not, deserved summary
execution without judge or jury. Therefore we know that the situation for black
Americans is rife with injustice.

Another case in point: if you raised
kids, did you at any point have The Talk with them? I don’t mean The Talk about
sex. I mean The Talk about what to say and do when the police pull you over
without cause, and what concrete steps you might take to try to ensure your
survival. Did you know that black American parents have to have that Talk with
their sons? Until Trayvon Martin was killed, I had never heard of it. It was at
that time, too, that NPR asked people to send in six-word essays about their
reaction to Trayvon Martin’s death. One of them resonated so strongly that I knew
I still had a lot of work to do. It read: “Angry black men are so scary.”

Friends, we need to listen to the
voices of African-Americans today. Our town of Bellingham is 88% white, and our
congregation of St. Paul’s is, at a glance, more than 95% white. Is this
something to be ashamed of? No, but it’s crucial to be aware of it as we proceed.
To be white in the Pacific Northwest means that we don’t even have to think
about race if we don’t want to. This is an example of what has become known as “white
privilege”—the ability to look at a situation involving race and to say, “I don’t
choose to think about that today.”

Blogger Franchesca Ramsey speaks to
people’s concern over the term “white privilege.” She explains, “Privilege does
not mean that you are rich, that you’ve had an easy life, that everything’s
been handed to you and you’ve never had to struggle or work hard. All it means
is that there are some things in life that you will not experience or ever have
to think about, just because of who you are.”[3] So
understanding my privilege means admitting, “I have never been in your shoes,
and I will not ever be. My stories are not your stories.” It’s a call to listen
before speaking.

Hey! I made a meme!

John the Baptist came to preach a
baptism of repentance, and to announce the coming of the anointed one. John
wasn’t criticizing all Jews. He was criticizing hypocritical behavior among his
fellow Jews, and many of those hypocrites came out in droves to hear him speak.
In the same way, the protests around our country today are not a condemnation of
all police officers, or of all white people. They are a call to open our eyes
to things happening in our country today and in our very selves, so that we can
be of use in efforts to chip away at the evil of racism.

Franchesca Ramsey
image from urbandaily.com

Franchesca Ramsey gives five tips for
being an ally in the fight against racism. First, understand your privilege. I’ve
found that this is a pretty touchy subject for a lot of us white folks, so I
hope we’ll continue to have conversations about it at St. Paul’s. In short, understanding
white privilege is not about feeling guilty or ashamed for being the color we
are. It’s about accepting that there is a whole reality that is all but invisible
to us, and then choosing our actions based on this knowledge.

Ramsey’s second tip is to listen and
do your homework. There are always more stories to hear. I’ve been reading a
lot of opinion pieces and blog posts, and I also have books I can recommend on
Christianity and race. I think the most important thing here is to accept that our
good intentions will often go awry if they are not well fed with the stories of
many people other than ourselves.

Third, speak up, not over. We’ve seen
this step ignored quite a bit since the Ferguson decision. When the slogan “Black
Lives Matter” began to emerge, white America was quick to rush in with a
counter-slogan: “ALL Lives Matter.” Well, yes, that’s true, but it is implied
in the first slogan, and that’s not what we were talking about anyway. This is
a classic example of speaking over—saying, “Yes, I know you’re trying to say
something true, but I can say something truer.” We rush to place the specific
story into a larger narrative, and this comes from our discomfort at being
called out. But if it’s not our own story, we need to let it be.

Step four is this: You’ll make
mistakes; apologize when you do. About five years ago a friend of mine wrote
something on Facebook about discrimination she had experienced. I stepped into
the conversation and proceeded to make it all about me, speaking right over her.
Now, I meant well. I thought I was being a good ally by saying, “I can relate
to that!” But she helped me see that I was belittling her experience, so I
apologized and went back to listening. That was the beginning of my education
in being an ally.

Finally, writes Ramsey, saying you’re
an ally is not enough. It’s not about slapping on a bumper sticker. It’s about
actually putting ourselves on the line. For some of us, that may mean marching
in protests. For others, it may mean speaking clearly and firmly to that one really
racist relative. Being an ally takes both humility and courage—kind of like
being a Christian.

John himself was not the light, but he
came to testify to the light. John taught that justice and liberation are what
God intends for God’s people. John spoke up until Jesus showed up. And then
John didn’t speak over Jesus. He baptized him. But make no mistake: by hearing
these words and by engaging in conversation about them, not only are we are not
the Messiah, but we are not even John the Baptist. John the Baptist is protesting
in Ferguson and in many other cities around our nation today, calling for
greater police accountability, as John actually did at one point in Luke’s
gospel (Luke 3:14). But John the Baptist is also pointing beyond himself to
someone greater.

Today, I invite you to join me at the river Jordan. Let’s pay close
attention to this man named John. Let’s long for release from the way our sins
hinder us, that we may make room for new birth. Christ is coming to bring
good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim
liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners. When we speak about race,
let us speak of the hope that God’s Kingdom will be born in us. Let’s continue
that conversation together. As we examine ourselves, do our
homework, and learn when to speak and when to listen, we wait and we work for
that redeemed world. Stir up your
power, O Lord, and with great might come among us. Amen.